Rest for the Soul

Don: Jesus expanded on the concept that the big T Truth is to be found in him (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”) when he said:

“I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants.” (Matthew 11:25)

The things that were hidden are a metaphor for the truth that will set us free—for freedom. He then extended, in what I think is some of the richest language he ever spoke, an invitation to us:

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

His contemporaries would have readily understood the yoke metaphor because they routinely yoked oxen to plough their fields and haul their carts. To be yoked in order to gain freedom is paradoxical.

A yoke signifies bondage:

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt so that you would not be their slaves, and I broke the bars of your yoke and made you walk erect. (Leviticus 26:13)

It is spiritual bondage, not merely physical, as was emphasized in Acts:

“Now therefore why do you put God to the test by placing upon the neck of the disciples a yoke which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear? But we believe that we are saved through the grace of the Lord Jesus, in the same way as they also are.” (Acts 15:10-11)

Freedom and bondage are both linked to grace, a linkage more fully developed in Galatians:

Tell me, you who want to be under law, do you not listen to the law? For it is written that Abraham had two sons, one by the bondwoman and one by the free woman. But the son by the bondwoman was born according to the flesh, and the son by the free woman through the promise. … And you brethren, like Isaac, are children of promise. But as at that time he who was born according to the flesh persecuted him who was born according to the Spirit, so it is now also. But what does the Scripture say?
“Cast out the bondwoman and her son,
For the son of the bondwoman shall not be an heir with the son of the free woman.”
So then, brethren, we are not children of a bondwoman, but of the free woman.
It was for freedom that Christ set us free; therefore keep standing firm and do not be subject again to a yoke of slavery. (Galatians 4:23, 28-31, 5:1)

The yoke again is a metaphor for freedom from spiritual bondage. Children of grace are children of unexpected promise, children of the free. This the truth that sets us free.

Jesus offers rest not just for the body, but for the soul as well. The Greek word for “to give rest, to give comfort” is αναπαύω ‎(anapávo), whose root is Ancient Greek παῦσις ‎(paûsis)—“pause” or “stop”. The scriptural Greek for “weary”, “heavy laden”, and “rest” all have deep significance. The Greek word for “labor” or “toil”—κοπιάω  (kopiaó)—implies working to exhaustion. It is not casual work. The Greek for “heavy laden” is φορτίζω (phortizó). But Jesus said the load to be borne is not an excessive one but a load just what is necessary. In essence, Jesus was saying that when we require maximum exertion to carry an average load, he will provide rest. It is rest not from being excessively burdened but rest from the day-to-day burden we carry. The truth that can set us free is that Jesus offers relief from the ordinary stresses of everyday life if we find ourselves unable to cope with them, not just the extraordinary ones. It’s a freedom not to escape the reality of life but freedom to get help in bearing it. Putting down the yoke of bondage and picking up the yoke of grace, of relief, of freedom, is the discovery of the Truth that is in Jesus.

Jesus equated freedom with rest for the soul. We know what physical rest is, but what is rest for the soul?  Why should the soul need rest? What would the soul be resting from? What happens if a soul does not get rest?

David: This seems a very Libertarian message! It’s as though Jesus is talking about freedom from the burden of government—of the law. Jesus certainly seems to take many a swipe at the Mosaic law, and this is another example.

Alice: We all sin and we probably all experience the heavy load we feel when we sin. There is no respite unless we confess our sins to God and only God can take care of that deep feeling of regret and remorse. It is something that has to be experienced in order to be understood. It is great to feel free from worry and from the consequences of our sins, from remorse, from people’s judgment of us. Only God can provide this kind of freedom.

David: If one is in such low spirits, such utter despair, that one needs (merits?) a Beatitudes level of blessing, then it will surely come through grace. But what of the less onerously troubled soul, the merely “restless” soul? We sometimes just feel out of sorts for no readily apparent reason. In times of deep distress the spirit—the soul—cries out, but in times of spiritual restlessness it seems only to sigh. Perhaps this describes the spirit of most people in “faith stage 3” as they encounter and work through their doubts. It is a burden, but not necessarily an onerous one.

Don: Can we ever overcome a restless spirit on our own? Can we ever pull ourselves up by our spiritual bootstraps?

David: Perhaps we can; through music, for example. Someone once called music “a device to inflate the soul” (and almost ruined my love of music, but I recovered!) Great symphonies are spiritually calming and even spiritually uplifting, as are grand cathedrals and ornate churches, temples, and mosques. So it is possible, it seems to me, to “self-medicate” a troubled soul.

Alice: On a temporary basis.

Don: There seems to be some sort of imperative to give the soul rest. Restlessness is very disruptive to life, so curing it is highly desirable. And yet, seeking it in small t truths of religion seems to make it worse in some people. Is this part of what Jesus was trying to say?

David: Perhaps the soul needs sleep as the body and brain need sleep. Harry often remarked on a feeling of calm he felt when he went into grand churches. I have always felt that too, and it’s a spiritual—not a religious—experience. Perhaps if religions did nothing else than build beautiful churches, mosques, and temples and then shut up, they would work to far greater spiritual effect.

Alice: Are spirit and soul the same? Does the spirit need rest?

Don: When the Truth set the adulteress free, what effect did that have on her soul? She was told to “go and sin no more” but was she likely, given her circumstances, to have done so? If we find rest—freedom—for our souls, do we then go on to lead sinless lives?

Alice: By not condemning her (and us) and by setting her soul at ease he perhaps he was opening the door for a sinless, or at least less sinful, life.

Chris: Perhaps the people of Jesus’s time were so heavily regulated and burdened by small t truths of the law that in their bondage they had no time to contemplate the big T Truth that Jesus was trying to share. When you abandon the yoke of small t truths for the yoke of Big T Truth it is comforting and liberating. Today we lead hectic lives and finding time to rest the soul is difficult. Jesus said to step back and let him take care of resting our soul.

Don: That Jesus was not enamored of regulation can be seen in the chapter (Matthew 12) following the one we quoted from. It tells of how Jesus ignored the regulation about not working on the Sabbath by performing miracles, and how Jesus explained that the regulations undermined the true purpose and meaning of the Sabbath as an opportunity for reflection on God’s grace.

The Greek scripture is especially clear that God gives rest from the ordinary stresses of daily life and not just from acute and deep distress.

David: To me, the spirit is the inner light is God. In that case, it would seem that God needs a rest sometimes.

Don: Indeed God does take rests; at least, he did at the Creation:

By the seventh day God completed His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the seventh day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made. (Genesis 2:2-3)

But whether he needed to rest is another question.

David: To my process theologist way of thinking, God the Becoming is like a developing child that needs rest in order to grow and come to maturity (to Being) in time.

Don: God clearly rests; the question is whether he does so because he needs to or in order to set an example for us to follow.

What about Alice’s question about the soul and the spirit?

David: I think they are the same.

Alice: In Arabic, they are different concepts. The spirit is the breath of life. Spirit plus body makes a soul. It is one’s psyche, one’s everything.

Don:

Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

Chris: The spirit may not need rest but once merged with a body then the whole needs a rest.

David: I usually hear of the soul in the context of its ultimately leaving the body upon the death of the body. I don’t see a difference between spirit and soul.

Don: “I am the way, the truth, and the life” contains both the big T Truth and its embodiment in life.

Alice: The problem is that some Christians view the soul as immortal. But it is not—it dies along with the body. Only spirit is immortal. On the death of the body it goes back to its giver, God. God is not only spirit, he is everything. In the turmoil that is life, rest is needed. God made us and he knew we would need rest. God does not need rest, but we do.

David: Philosophical Daoism doesn’t discuss these things in quite the same way, but there is no doubt that the ideal life—the Way—is restful. A key precept is to Do Nothing, which to my understanding means being non-reactive to stressful situations in the way that water reacts to the rock in the stream: Go around it, don’t beat yourself to death on it. Classical Chinese poetry reflects that psyche, that combination of ethos, logos, and pathos. I posted this recently to illustrate a Daoist perspective on Truth but it serves again here as an example of restfulness:

WHILE VISITING ON THE SOUTH STREAM
THE TAOIST PRIEST CH’ANG

Liu Changqing

Walking along a little path,
I find a footprint on the moss,
A white cloud low on the quiet lake,
Grasses that sweeten an idle door,
A pine grown greener, with the rain,
A brook that comes from a mountain source.
And, mingling with Truth among the flowers,
I have forgotten what to say.

寻南溪常道士
刘长卿

一路经行处， 莓苔见履痕。
白云依静渚， 春草闭闲门。
过雨看松色， 随山到水源。
溪花与禅意， 相对亦忘言。

To me, this is every bit as spiritual as anything Western religion has to offer. I think Jesus was trying to get us to realize that spirit trumps religion as grace trumps law and as the immortal trumps the mortal. The life that is Jesus is a spiritual life. The life he wants us to lead is a spiritual life.

Alice: Jesus asked why we worry about food and clothing, because life is much more important. God doesn’t want us to work ourselves to death physically for vain mortal reasons, yet that seems to be the way the world is going. Everybody is grasping for something tangible. That’s bondage.

David: It explains the attraction of drugs, as a way to grab some respite from the rat race. Then again, Marx described religion as a drug, too: The “opiate of the masses.” In that sense they both serve a valid function, to enable one to step outside daily life, take a break from it. Perhaps a drug-induced “high” is equivalent to the sense of serenityone feels in a grand church. I used to smoke a pipe and found that immensely calming. Were it not for the health issues I would still be smoking.

Don: Here’s the cure for anxiety Alice was talking about:

“For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

“So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:25-34)

Alice: This is the true meaning of rest. The Sabbath is an analogy to help us understand the meaning of rest; it doesn’t mean sitting at home doing nothing.

David: That is a very Daoist passage!

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